The call came to Diane de Poitiers through the locked door of the king’s chamber, and it was not from Henry. It was from his wife. For ten days the king of France had lingered between life and death, the splintered shaft of a jousting lance driven deep into his eye, and through all of it he had called for one name. Not Catherine.
Never Catherine. Diane. He had begged for her, pleaded for her, his despair growing as the hours wore on and the door stayed shut. Catherine de’ Medici, the wife he had never loved, stood on the other side of that threshold and gave the order that would define the rest of her life.
Diane de Poitiers was not to enter. The king would die without ever seeing her again. It had not always been this way, and to understand why Catherine barred the door, one had to go back more than a quarter of a century, to the moment a fourteen-year-old Italian girl first set foot in the French court. The year was 1533, and Catherine de’ Medici had arrived to marry Henry of Orléans, the second son of King Francis I.
She was the daughter of a wealthy banking family, a merchant princess by birth, and for all her money, she was considered beneath the French crown. Yet the match had been made, and the girl herself arrived with high hopes. When she first laid eyes on her future husband, she swooned. Tall, athletically built, and good-looking, Henry appeared every inch the prince out of a chivalric romance.
For Catherine, it was love at first sight. The feeling was not mutual. Contemporaries watched the young prince meet his bride and noted with sly amusement that he seemed at best disinterested, at worst repulsed, by the short, stumpy, prominently browed teenage girl who had come to be his wife. On their wedding night, the two fourteen-year-olds were forced to endure the famously mortifying tradition of consummating the marriage in the presence of witnesses.
Henry performed his husbandly duty and then immediately resumed the business of avoiding his new wife. Catherine’s start at the French court was rough by any measure. The marriage had been unpopular from the beginning. Many French officials believed the crown had gotten the short end of the stick by marrying the prince to a mere banker’s daughter.
True, she brought a hefty dowry, and her uncle, Pope Clement VII, had made promises that would benefit France on the European political stage. But within a year the pope was dead, and the political advantages of the marriage collapsed. In one fell swoop, Catherine went from high-value bride to dynastic dead weight, and she was made to feel it keenly. To help ease her transition, King Francis had selected one of his wife’s ladies-in-waiting to act as her courtly mentor.
The woman chosen was Diane de Poitiers, a beautiful, intelligent young widow who also happened to be Catherine’s second cousin. The arrangement had an unintended effect. It put Diane squarely in the path of Catherine’s husband. Within a year, the thirty-four-year-old Diane was in a very public relationship with the fifteen-year-old Prince Henry.
The age difference was nineteen years, and the relationship was anything but out of the blue. Henry had carried a giant crush on Diane de Poitiers for most of his childhood, a fact of which she herself was entirely unaware at the time. Many believed it began in 1526, when Henry and his elder brother Francis, the Dauphin, were sent to live with Charles V as political hostages. They were essentially standing in for their father, prisoners of the Holy Roman Emperor, to guarantee the French king’s good behavior.
With their mother dead, it was their grandmother’s lady-in-waiting, Diane de Poitiers, who accompanied the boys to the handoff to Charles’s officials. A frightened child of seven, headed into political captivity, Henry had clung to the beautiful twenty-six-year-old Diane for comfort. He never emotionally let go. Through the dark, lonely days of his five-year ordeal, he idealized her as the woman of his dreams.
The prince returned to France in 1531, and Henry went silly over Diane all over again. That year, King Francis remarried, and a jousting tournament was held to celebrate the coronation of the new queen. Francis and Henry, thirteen and twelve respectively, joined in the joust. The Dauphin wore the colors of the new queen on his lance, as chivalric tradition demanded.
Henry boldly wore Diane de Poitiers’s colors instead. Later that year, Diane’s much older husband died, leaving her a young widow. Two years later, Henry begrudgingly wed his teenage bride while still harboring his boyish crush. In 1534, Henry finally shot his shot.
Despite the nineteen-year age difference, Diane reciprocated his affections. From that moment on, Henry was entirely lost to Catherine. In the annals of royal mistress lore, Diane de Poitiers casts a very long shadow. Henry did not merely love her.
He worshiped her. The loyalty and adoration meant for a wife were lavished instead on his mistress, whom he treated as his closest adviser, his confidante, his emotional anchor. Catherine became the third wheel in her own marriage. The scenario was unfortunately all too common for royal women in arranged marriages.
But Henry’s utter lack of discretion and care for Catherine’s feelings was especially egregious. To Catherine’s abject humiliation, her husband publicly pedestalized Diane. He dressed in Diane’s colors. He signed letters with their joint monogram.
He designed a device formed by their interlocking initials. Entwined Hs and Ds soon appeared everywhere, on his clothes, on his armor, on his servants’ livery, and eventually on the walls of their various residences. Everywhere Catherine looked, she was forced to confront the nightmare of being trapped inside someone else’s love story. Catherine may have hated Diane, and with good reason.
But Diane always made a point of treating her lover’s wife with kindness and public displays of respect. In 1536, Henry’s brother Francis unexpectedly died, leaving Henry heir apparent to the throne. Now married to the Dauphin, Catherine would one day be queen of France, and Diane showed her the due deference demanded by this elevation in status. The same could not be said for the rest of the court.
The couple were still childless after three years, and now that Henry was next in line, many French officials began an active campaign to get rid of Catherine so a new bride could be secured for the future king. That was when the dynamic between the awkward threesome got really weird. Whether Catherine liked it or not, Diane proved an unexpected ally. It may not have been out of the kindness of her heart.
After all, it was to Diane’s benefit that her lover’s wife was homely and largely powerless. But in order to protect her own position, both women knew that Catherine would have to produce an heir. It was Diane who pushed Henry to visit Catherine’s bed, gradually becoming something like an intimacy coordinator for the royal couple. After she and Henry had their fun, Diane would send him directly upstairs to his wife.
She even coached Catherine on which positions would be most beneficial in facilitating conception. With Diane’s help, Catherine eventually did her duty, and she did it spectacularly. Over the next twelve years she gave birth to no fewer than ten children, including three future kings of France. Catherine’s position was finally secure.
But Henry’s heart remained closed to her. There was no room there for anyone but Diane. For the twelve years of Henry’s reign, Diane de Poitiers was the most powerful woman at the French court, her influence far surpassing Catherine’s. Foreign guests and dignitaries treated Diane as a second queen, and Henry consulted her on everything.
Despite their temporary alliances and civil coexistence, Catherine only grew to resent her rival all the more as the years passed. As powerful as she was, Diane’s position was still entirely dependent on the king. And in 1559, everything changed in a matter of moments. Henry was jousting in a celebratory tournament, once more wearing Diane’s colors instead of his wife’s, when he took a lance to the eye.
The wound was catastrophic. Doctors were called, and the king was rushed to his chambers. That was when Catherine exacted her revenge. The queen immediately assumed control, restricting access to the royal apartments.
Henry lingered on for ten days, calling for Diane all the while. In an act of perhaps justified, but still brutal, cruelty, Catherine forbade Diane from entering the king’s chamber. She ignored her husband’s increasingly despairing pleas to see the woman who had been his partner for twenty-five years, the woman he had loved for almost the entirety of his life. Henry II died on July 10, 1559, without ever seeing Diane again.
After decades of humiliation, the power dynamic flipped overnight. With Henry dead and Catherine queen mother, Diane’s fall was swift and staggering. Catherine immediately banished her rival from court. Diane’s magnificent Château de Chenonceau, her prized property gifted to her by Henry, was seized and claimed for Catherine herself.
Diane would live the rest of her life in exile until her death at the age of sixty-five. Catherine de’ Medici went on to become one of the most formidable and feared women in European history. History remembers her as cunning, callous, ruthless. But it often glazes over what made her that way.
For thirty years she had endured emotional neglect, public humiliation, and forced proximity to her husband’s mistress. And when the moment finally came, the door to the king’s chamber closed behind her, and Catherine de’ Medici made sure the woman who had taken everything from her never got the chance to say goodbye.
